One of the strangest claims, widely spread in the world of religious preaching, has to do with the phenomenon known by science as “the Big Bang”. The religious believer imagines a big explosion, say, like the one we observe when a bomb goes off. A great amount of things is blasted in all directions, and – lo and behold – they all rearrange exactly in the form of stars, oceans, plants, animals and people… you think?

An amusing example of this claim challenges the audience further. It asks: What is the probability for a tornado going through a junkyard – to arrange all parts exactly in the shape of a Boeing 747?

The probability of this is practically zero. However, it has nothing to do with the Big Bang. It’s important to understand two things about the Big Bang: There was no “bang” and it was not “big”. It’s just a nickname.

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It wasn’t “big”, because in its beginning we’re talking about sizes much much smaller than stars and suns. Our scientific knowledge includes the discussion of sizes we cannot even see with a microscope. And it wasn’t a “bang” or “explosion”, but rather a rapid expansion process. Very rapid. In a process that earned the name “Inflation” – our universe expanded trillions of times in a very short time… and it still does nowadays – meaning the Big Bang is still going on.

Since it’s still going on, it’s a bit meaningless to discuss what happened “in the end” of the Big Bang. Its initial stages, however, included no stars, no oceans, and certainly no plants, animals or Boeing airplanes. By using the laws of physics, the above expansion caused the gradual formation of rather simple entities, one of which was vast amounts of Hydrogen gas. Research has discovered how it took hundreds of millions of years for the physical forces to form the initial stars.

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The universe today is about 14 billion years old, and the processes that have created more “complex” things – are immensely slow (and we know a lot about them). No explosion, no nothing.

In fact, the religious claim about the lack of reason in creating complex things quickly – is nothing but a confession about the problematics of the religious story. Creating plants and animals from an “explosion” happens only in religious stories: Some “God” arrives, makes a “kaboom”, and a pile of dirt turns into a person (“And the evening and the morning were the fifth day … So God created man … And the evening and the morning were the sixth day … And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground”).

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If you can turn a pile of dirt into a man in an explosion, you can certainly turn expanding Hydrogen gas into starts, plants, animals and people, in gradual processes that take billions of years. Unlike the former claim, the latter has zillions of evidences.